Many industries rely on advertising to attract a steady flow of qualified customers. Advertising campaigns may cost thousands of dollars and utilize various media, such as newspapers, magazines, yellow pages, television and direct mailings. In the multi-housing industry, for example, advertising expenses are second only to capital expenditures. Hence, both advertisers and marketing firms are highly motivated to verify the cost-effectiveness of advertising media and advertising campaigns.
Nevertheless, many conventional methods of advertising fail to successfully utilize technology to conduct a sufficiently cost-effective operation. For example, in the traditional model for renting apartment units in the multi-housing industry, a potential customer may provide preliminary information to a sales/office representative over the telephone, in person, and/or through electronic communications. The representative may be forced to manually write down the customer's information onto a “guest card” which is used to maintain a record of the communication. Given the nature of such a manual system, it can become difficult and/or nearly impossible for a sales/office representative to efficiently keep track of the potentially large number of communications received by the rental office. In the case of a repeat customer, it may be desirable for the representative to quickly retrieve information concerning one or more prior communications made by the customer. Unfortunately, manual-based systems have inherent limitations involved in physically locating and pulling relevant paper files, all of which costs valuable time.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a comprehensive customer information system which provides a streamlined approach to processing incoming communications that are placed in response to advertisements. It would be desirable for such a system to maintain records of past communications, and provide an efficient way to retrieve such records in realtime.